Cloud computing services can provide information technology (IT) as a service over the Internet or dedicated network, with delivery on demand. Cloud computing services can range from full applications and development platforms, to servers, storage, and virtual desktops. Corporate and government entities can utilize cloud computing services to address a variety of application and infrastructure needs. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform to allow consumers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure.
Cloud computing utilizes server and storage virtualization to allocate/reallocate resources rapidly. The resources can include virtual resources, such as virtual machines and containers. The containers and virtual machines in the cloud can access and share storage devices in the cloud. The storage devices can include a file system for organizing data on the storage devices. Generally, when a container is provisioned on a host in a cloud, the container mounts the file system, which typically gives the container access to the contents of the entire file system. Generally, virtual machines are provisioned in the cloud via a hypervisor and a device emulator, and have a data input/output (I/O) path that accesses the storage device via the device emulator.